Perfect delivery, just the policy a touch off-course

Thursday 27 October 2005 20.02 EDT
First published on Thursday 27 October 2005 20.02 EDT

Patricia Hewitt speaks with an oh-so-careful verbal modulation that resembles the voice that gives out instructions in those in-car satellite navigation systems: "Now - turn - right". Nothing is ever a surprise or a problem. Every wrong turning, ignored suggestion or unexpected diversion is carefully noted, recalculated and responded to. Set the device to take you from Bakewell to Matlock and it will see you safely home, even if you divert on the way up a mud track over a Highland moor.

Every motorist longs for the voice to get it wrong. What would she say? "Darling, I'm terribly sorry, I meant the last exit." But the voice never does admit error. And neither did Ms Hewitt as she faced the health select committee yesterday to explain her disintegrating smoking ban.

Driving well off course and stuck up a cul de sac, her satellite-system should have been in meltdown. But it never faltered. She purred on as usual, ever-reliable, ever forgiving of the swerves and wrong turnings forced on her this week by her cabinet colleagues.

Sliding into a corridor outside the committee room yesterday morning she permitted herself a little joke, "I haven't taken up smoking." Then she paused beneath a portrait of Lord Wilson, his face hidden in swirls of smoke from his pipe.

She entered the committee room, a modern place, all first-name terms and bleached wood, and settled down, her hair perfectly set and her pearls in place. She clasped her fingers and began to explain to her tormentors why she, as a Labour health secretary, has had to announce a health policy which will make the working classes' health worse.

This is all a long way from Ms Hewitt's dream, which is to make it almost impossible to smoke anywhere. Yesterday she talked wistfully about the prospect of banning smoking in people's homes, too. Less refined and more menacing elements in the cabinet, led by the ex-smoker John Reid, have forced her to retreat instead to a position which effectively makes it easier to smoke the poorer and more English you are.

Under the plans, Mr Reid's Scottish constituents are banned from smoking in the members' bar at Airdrie FC, but Ms Hewitt's Leicester voters can keep puffing away in Leicester's working men's clubs. So, incidentally, can toffs at over their glasses of port at White's. David Cameron, who smokes Marlboro Lights, will be exempt.

This is a ban for the middle classes. Or, as Ms Hewitt described it, "a significant step towards the complete ban that you and others would like to see".

"Others"? Which others did she have in mind? "Everyone except that appalling John Reid" was the unspoken answer. It was not just a significant step, either, but a "big" one. And an "enormous" one. But of course not a complete one. "The great majority would like us to go further," she said, peevishly. It was plain the great majority included her.

Hearing Ms Hewitt having to defend this shocking humiliation was almost the equal of catching her with an unfiltered high-tar Gauloise hanging from her mouth. She allowed herself only one flash of anger, when the Tory bruiser Mike Penning, an ex-firefighter who looks the type to light his next fag before stubbing out the last one, charged her with being "rolled over" by the cabinet.

At least he didn't say roll-up, but Ms Hewitt was having none of it. "I object very strongly to the personal nature of your remarks." She probably wanted to say that to John Reid, too. Poor Ms Hewitt. We could picture her Glaswegian predecessor blowing smoke into her face and all but hear the accompanying cackle: "Now - execute - U-turn."